Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 22/4/2014: More GNU/Linux Gains, Syria Updates



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Telerik Open Sources Mobile App UI Software Code
    The offering makes the source code of 38 UI widgets in the Kendo UI Core publicly available for use by both commercial and non-commercial developers. In addition, developers have access to related tools for mobile app development, such as templates and input validation. The resources are available from both Telerik's website and a GitHub repository.


  • Why an open source community beats access to tech support
    I’ve been using Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), for the websites I manage for over four years now. Though there may be some quirks in working with an open source product, I cannot imagine doing it any other way.


  • 7 skills to land your open source dream job
    "Work on stuff that matters" is a famous call to action from founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly. But, how about working on stuff that matters while getting paid for it? There are an abundance of open source-related jobs out there if you’ve got the right skills.

    Mark Atwood, Director of Open Source Engagement at HP gave a talk on How to Get One of These Awesome Open Source Jobs at the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta, Georgia this year (April 2 - 3). His talk was originally targeted to students, but he later removed the "Advice for Students" part because the seven tips below really apply to anyone looking to score their open source dream job.


  • Events





  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • Apache OpenOffice hits 100-million download milestone
      “Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times,” reads an announcement by The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) which oversees more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives. ASF, a non-profit corporation, provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of over 170 open source software projects. Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.


    • Rebuilt LibreOffice 4.2.3 packages fix KDE-related bug




  • Education



  • Funding



    • Google Is Financing A Lot Of Great Open-Source Work This Summer
      Google just announced their list of accepted student projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. After going through all of the projects on the list for the different upstream open-source projects involved, there's a ton of improvements to be worked on by students this summer and financed by Google. This is perhaps the most exciting Google Summer of Code ever.




  • Public Services/Government



    • Munich praises open source development community
      The German city of Munich is complimenting the free and open source software development community for providing fast and easy assistance. On the blog of the city's IT department, Peter Onderscheka, business unit manager for IT stategy and IT security, writes how the developers' quick responses helped the city implement new services. Examples include sending alerts about new job openings, a solution based on Phplist, and an online order form for coupons, using Pdfsam.

      "Users of open source products can easily get in touch with the developers, pose questions, propose features and even help fix bugs", Onderscheka writes. "The developers usually respond immediately."

      "These informal and direct contacts provide straightforward and free access to the core developers of open source software", he adds.

      Onderscheka thanks two developers in particular, Michiel Dethmers, from the Netherlands, who is involved in the Phplist project, and Italian Andrea Vacondio, helping the the city tweak Pdfsam.

      Choosing the Phplist newsletter solution allowed Munich to rely on the feedback from the community "which answered in detail our questions about security."




  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming



    • Programming is fun – the free software column
      Computer programming is an art and is essential to the way we live. Computing provides the bricks and mortar of our lives, it’s an important component in the way our world is built and shouldn’t be tucked away under sufferance in a dry and dusty science classroom as an adjunct to something else. Programming is fun and practical and useful, and makes things happen. Just by grasping a few concepts, anyone can be a programmer and turn a game on its head, make something work – and this is a world that the Raspberry Pi was made for, a tool such as Meccano and Lego that is useful and fun for both teachers and pupils alike, and is as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.


    • Open Source Better Than Proprietary Code






Leftovers



  • Science



  • Health/Nutrition



    • Fukushima disaster: Tokyo hides truth as children die, become ill from radiation - ex-mayor
      The tragedy of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster took place almost three years ago. Since then, radiation has forced thousands out of their homes and led to the deaths of many. It took great effort to prevent the ultimate meltdown of the plant – but are the after effects completely gone? Tokyo says yes; it also claims the government is doing everything it can for those who suffered in the disaster. However, disturbing facts sometimes rise to the surface. To shed a bit of light on the mystery of the Fukushima aftermath, Sophie Shevardnadze talks to the former mayor of one of the disaster-struck cities. Katsutaka Idogawa is on SophieCo today.


    • Russia won’t import GMOs, has ‘enough space and opportunities to produce organic food’
      The importation ban, issued with the consent of the Russian parliament, was initiated in late February. As the orders trickle down, a widespread monitoring effort will be placed over the Russian agricultural sector. Imports will be heavily inspected to assure that GMOs aren’t entering the country. This new all-out ban strengthens very restrictive policies already put in place. Current Russian law requires producers to label any product containing GMOs in excess of 0.9 percent of the product.




  • Security



    • The Heartbleed drama queens
      The news is rife with screeching reports about the Heartbleed vulnerability, with some news outlets questioning the security model of open source. If you aren’t familiar with it, Heartbleed is “…a security bug in the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library, widely used to implement the Internet’s Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol” according to Wikipedia. While it certainly is a bad thing, it’s also not the armageddon of the Internet that some in the media have been proclaiming it to be, and it’s not a harbinger of doom for open source software development either.


    • Easter egg: DSL router patch merely hides backdoor instead of closing it
      First, DSL router owners got an unwelcome Christmas present. Now, the same gift is back as an Easter egg. The same security researcher who originally discovered a backdoor in 24 models of wireless DSL routers has found that a patch intended to fix that problem doesn’t actually get rid of the backdoor—it just conceals it. And the nature of the “fix” suggests that the backdoor, which is part of the firmware for wireless DSL routers based on technology from the Taiwanese manufacturer Sercomm, was an intentional feature to begin with.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • MANPADS to Syria Rebels: Good or Bad Idea?


    • Syrian rebels get SA-16 anti-aircraft missiles after receiving advanced anti-tank weapons
      Syrian rebels have been sighted wielding anti-aircraft weapons in various combat sectors including the Damascus region in the last few days. Just as on April 6, debkafile was the first publication to disclose the arming of Syrian opposition forces with their first US weapons, BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles, our military sources now reveal that they have also acquired - and are using - Russian-made 9K310 Igla-1 aka SA-16 anti-tank rockets, which have an operational range of 5.2 km.


    • US ordered to release memo in Anwar al-Awlaki drone killing
      Federal court rules in favour of ACLU and New York Times to force release of papers describing legal justification for strike


    • Obama ordered to divulge legal basis for killing Americans with drones
      The Obama administration must disclose the legal basis for targeting Americans with drones, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in overturning a lower court decision likened to "Alice in Wonderland."


    • Obama Will Finally Have to Explain Why the US Can Kill Americans with Drones
      In the years-long conversation about President Barack Obama's incredible drone wars, we've heard opaque, albeit scintillating, references to threat matrices and kill lists. But there's one thing we've never heard: What is the president's legal rationale for extrajudicial killing of Americans with drones?


    • 55 al-Qaida militants reported dead in Yemen after US-backed air offensive
      At least 55 al-Qaida militants have been killed in Yemen, the country's interior ministry claimed after an intensive weekend air offensive in which US drones are believed to have been involved.


    • In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and now Ukraine: catastrophe follows US and Nato meddling
      Different though Ukraine is from Iraq and Afghanistan there are some ominous similarities in the Western involvement in all three countries, says Patrick Cockburn


    • More than 100 hate-crime murders linked to single website, report finds
      Stormfront founder Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, criticized Miller for giving users of his site a bad reputation. “We have enough of a problem with how we are portrayed without some homicidal whack job coming along and reinforcing that,” Black told the Daily Beast. After he was banned from Stormfront, the SLPC said Miller posted more than 12,000 times on a similar forum, Vanguard News Network, whose slogan is “No Jews, Just Right.”


    • A Key Test for International Law
      In truth, if colonial conquest and force majeure are legitimate grounds of sovereignty, and if extermination of a population can wipe out the legal right to self-determination, then in international law Britain has the right to Diego Garcia and to give it as tribute to their US overlords. But if international law has any relationship of any kind to principles of justice, then Britain should not be permitted to reap the dubious benefit of genocide. What international law actually is in the neo-conservative era is the real question before the UN tribunal now looking at the Diego Garcia question.


    • Missile Strikes in Yemen and Weapons to Syria: the US Steps Up its Middle East Military Interventions
      American drone missile attacks and air strikes killed more than three dozen people in southern Yemen over the weekend. The carnage coincided with press reports that the Obama administration is moving to ship advanced weapons to “rebel” groups fighting the Assad government in Syria.


    • Seymour Hersh: Turkey Behind 2013 Sarin Gas Attack in Syria
      Turkey was behind the horrific Aug. 21, 2013, sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of innocents in a Damascus suburb "to push [President] Obama over the red line" and strike Syria, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh claims in the London Review of Books.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife





  • Finance



    • Spain's 'Robin Hood' swindled banks to help fight capitalism
      They call him the Robin Hood of the banks, a man who took out dozens of loans worth almost half a million euros with no intention of ever paying them back. Instead, Enric Duran farmed the money out to projects that created and promoted alternatives to capitalism.




  • Censorship



  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights



    • Police raid home searching for owner of Twitter account mocking mayor
      Covered by the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois this week, seven members of the Peoria Police Department executed a search warrant yesterday in order to discover the identity of someone operating a fake Twitter account that parodied Peoria mayor Jim Ardis (pictured above). The police seized multiple mobile phones in addition to computers stored at the residence. Three people at the home were brought into the police department for questioning and two members of the household that were working at the time were picked up by police from their place of employment and taken to the station.


    • Sweden Goes Full Retard, Requires Registration Of Every Individual Playing Lottery
      Sweden, like most European countries, has a number of governmentally-run state lotteries that are an efficient extra tax on the people who can’t math properly. Because of the jackpot sizes (nine-figure euro or dollar amounts), they are still hugely popular. From June 1, the Swedish state lottery requires people who want to buy a simple lottery ticket to identify and register.


    • Science teacher's suspension spurs petition drive
      A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.




  • DRM etc.



    • Home entertainment implementations are pretty appalling
      Which left dealing with the installed software. The BDT-230 is based on a Mediatek chipset, and like most (all?) Mediatek systems runs a large binary called "bdpprog" that spawns about eleventy billion threads and does pretty much everything. Runnings strings over that showed, well, rather a lot, but most promisingly included a reference to "/mnt/sda1/vudu/vudu.sh". Other references to /mnt/sda1 made it pretty clear that it was the mount point for USB mass storage. There were a couple of other constraints that had to be satisfied, but soon attempting to run Vudu was actually setting a blank root password and launching telnetd.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Five Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything From Miracle Drugs to Science Research
      Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?

      Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.


    • Copyrights



      • Google Asked to Censor Two Million Pirate Bay URLs


        The Pirate Bay reached a dubious milestone today, as copyright holders have now asked Google to remove two million of the site's URLs from its search results. According to Google this means that between one and five percent of all Pirate Bay links are no longer discoverable in its search engine.








Recent Techrights' Posts

Misinformation is Not Intelligence
It's low-grade plagiarism and it fails to show any signs of intelligence
'Tech' Gimmicks Are for Advertising, Not for Usability
In the case of Microsoft, they latched onto slop
BetaNews Sacked Brian Fagioli and Deleted His Comments, But He Still Tries to Use the "BetaNews" Brand for Self-Affirmation
Fagioli takes the work of other people
[Meme] Hard to Be a Better Person?
Sooner or later they'll realise that for each pound I spend they need to spend about 1,000 times more
New US Editor for The Register is a Microsoft Booster
"Avram Piltch has served as US editor for The Register since July 2025."
 
IBM's Debt Rose by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in the Past 6 Months Alone
The "hey hi" circus is coming to an end
Yes, Master
Gaslighting by actual racists
Microsoft Bribes and Buys Politicians to Tell Europe What to Do About Free Software (Which It's Attacking)
Microsoft: we speak for the thing that we are attacking! Follow the money...
Making Backups Quickly and Reliably
Backups are imperative, more so in an age of uncertainty, unpredictable weather, and worsening standards (quality of products going down while prices go up)
Techrights Investigation: Estimating the Point in Time LinuxIac Turned Into LLM Slop (Part of the Time)
Bobby Borisov got lazy
10th Month, Ten Weeks From Now, at Ten AM
In Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 24, 2025
A Nadella Memo Distracts From Microsoft's Cheapening Of the Workforce
Right now the "MSM" (mainstream media) is flooded/overwhelmed by garbage pieces that relay lies for Nadella
Vanishing Faces of GNU/Linux
Free software projects do not depend on any one person or company to still exist
Microsoft Says It Lost 400 Million Windows Users, Now It's Waiting for GNU/Linux to Stop Booting on 'Old' PCs
When it comes to Windows, Microsoft is fully aware of the issue and statements it made earlier this summer suggest it lost 400 million Windows users
Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, linuxsecurity.com, LinuxIac, and More
Also: The Register's Microsoft agenda (new editor)
Gemini Links 25/07/2025: Gemtext Aware Titan Editor and Gemini Protocol Comeback
Links for the day
Links 24/07/2025: Convicted Felon Quits UNESCO, "Vibe Coding Goes Wrong", and Signalgate Gets Worse
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/07/2025: Forgejo Woes and Smolnet Directory Week
Links for the day
Links 24/07/2025: Storage Tapes Still Kicking, Windows TCO 'on Steroids' (Microsoft-Induced Catastrophes)
Links for the day
Bobby Borisov (LinuxIac) Has Apparently Begun Experimenting With LLM Slop, So We Cannot Trust LinuxIac Anymore
So did LinuxIac become a slopfarm? Maybe not yet, but it's getting there
Informa TechTarget's ITProToday is Becoming a Slopfarm Generated by Microsoft Chatbots
Busted.
The LLM Con Artists Are Highly Destructive
Who will ever be held accountable for this scam?
Too Bribed by Microsoft to Move to Free Software?
Microsoft lies and Microsoft bribery (in politics)
Microsoft Hiring European Politicians is Another Form of Bribery; There Should be a European Investigation
When Microsoft bribed people in Europe for OOXML (there's no denying this!) a European government delegate said that Microsoft operated like a cult
Reda Demanded That FSF Removes Its Founder, Now Reda Works Directly for Microsoft
A sellout and a traitor, first working for GAFAM, now Microsoft
PCLinuxOS is Raising Money to Support Development After Fire Incident at the Host
PCLinuxOS has not had announcements lately
Speed of the Site Should be Better Now
The "bot attacks" impact the speed of the sister site too
Getting More From AnalogNowhere
Recently we used many images from AnalogNowhere
Microsoft, Microsofters and 'Secure' Boot Shills Already Storming the LWN Report About Expiring Certificate, Shooting the Messenger
LWN has clearly stuck a nerve
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Disable "Secure" Boot Today (the Only Better Time to Do So Was Yesterday)
Don't trust anything Red Hat tells you about security
Links 23/07/2025: Windows Killed Company After 150+ Years, US Government Mimics Russia's Attacks on the Media
Links for the day
Freedom Generally Wins at the End, History Shows (But It's Constantly Attacked, Too)
At the moment people realise "Linux" (e.g. Android) isn't enough to guarantee any freedoms
Over 3 Months Later Brett Wilson LLP Still Unable to Recruit a Media Lawyer?
"Immediate start", but not found... still unfilled
“Inhumane” and “Disgusting” Mass Layoff Execution, According to Microsoft Staff
The workers are looking for other places to work
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Slogan for Its 40th Anniversary
The freedoms are what's most important
Microsoft is Trying to "Pull a Nokia" on GNU/Linux as Desktop/Laptop Platform
We all remember that rather well, don't we?
LLM Slopfarms gbhackers.com, "Cyber Press" and CyberSecurityNews Are Drowning Google News (and Shame on Google for Feeding and Facilitating Them)
All are run by the same people
Links 23/07/2025: Droplets GUI Patent Monopoly Challenge, Nokia Leverages Illegal Patent Court Against Rivals
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Community in Geminispace and Challenges With Old Computers
Links for the day
Links 23/07/2025: Slop Patents Tackled, Slop Copyright Misuses Tackled by Politicians
Links for the day
Our Three Lawsuits Against Microsofters Are About to Become a Lot More Relevant to GNU/Linux
The Master will easily understand why Garrett has been attacking me since 2012
Links 23/07/2025: Retreating From Transparency on Jeffrey Epstein, We No Longer Have Press Freedom
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Piano and Food
Links for the day
New and Old
On Ageism in Tech
Slop Is Not Intelligence and It Does Not Enhance Productivity
Like voice dictation, which cannot tell the difference between "sheet" and "shit"
EPO Crimes Are Spreading to the British Court System
Society is now paying the price for failing to tackle crimes at the EPO
It's Time to Dump SharePoint and Here's What to Use Instead
Nextcloud, ownCloud, Bookstack, MediaWiki, and MediaGoblin
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Brett Wilson LLP Has Gone Silent
Sometimes silence says more than nothing at all
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Planet Ubuntu, and LinuxTechLab
some slopfarms show no remorse and they don't value their reputation at all
Links 23/07/2025: Book Bans, Storms, and Kangaroo Court for Patents Commits More Unlawful Acts of Overreach
Links for the day